“Damn it to hell,” said Thor. She sounded more resigned than angry.
“What were those things?” asked Samson.
“Let’s take a closer look,” said Sol. “Eledone, replay those final images.”
The hole ship obliged, bringing the screens back to life. Alander studied them with the others, puzzling over the sharply defined radar echoes. Images in other frequencies were less clear. Some showed faint patches that might have been evidence of camouflage against the chaotic background; others showed nothing at all. Most enigmatic was deep infrared, which revealed strange, three-dimensional, crosslike shapes rotating slowly in the distance, apparently unconnected to the radar ghosts but made significant by the fact that they appeared at no other frequency. Hidden watchers? Alander wondered. The minds behind the radar weapon?
“Eledone, what was it exactly that killed the probe?” Axford asked.
“I have insufficient data to answer that question,” replied the hole ship, scrolling technical information down a screen for anyone who wanted to see. “I can, however, tell you that the hull interface was breached in three places shortly before transmission ceased. A massive invasion followed, compromising all systems.”
Alander pointed at a screen showing the path followed by the alien weapons. “That looks like the way crystals grow through a supercritical solution.” Damage spread in straight lines from each puncture point, dividing and dividing again until everything in their path was overwhelmed. “I’m guessing nanotech.”
“Not the usual Starfish MO,” said Axford knowingly.
“Maybe the yellow dots and blue lances are too energetic for in here,” said Inari.
“In this raging soup?” Axford indicated the vein with its gases and molten metals through which Eledone was still tumbling. “I doubt they would make any difference whatsoever.”
“Then what does all of this tell you?” asked Thor.
Axford 1313 shrugged. “I’ll let you know when I’ve made up my mind.”
“I suggest you do it quickly,” said Sol, nodding at the screens showing the demise of the probe. “Because that hole the probe went through lies ahead of us, if we keep going with the flow, and presumably whatever killed it is still there. Unless we want to end up the same way, I suggest we figure out just what we’re going to do about it—and soon.”
“How long before we reach the tear, Eledone?” Thor asked the hole ship.
“Unless we use our NRTs, approximately three hours.”
“That’s not very long,” Inari pointed out unnecessarily.
“Which is all the more reason to not waste time dwelling on it,” said Thor. “Inari, I want you and Gou Mang to go over the telemetry, find anything we missed. Frank, Cleo, take a closer look at that attack data; if we can work out exactly what it is, maybe we’ll find a way to combat it. Sol, Peter, you might be able to find something we haven’t considered. And I’ll try to shift this bloody ship without getting us all killed.” Her gaze swept around the cockpit, taking in every member of the Crew. Alander felt a shiver run up his spine at her sudden resemblance to Sol. “Any objections?”
No one spoke.
“Right. Let’s get started and see if we can’t find a way out of this goddamn mess.”
2.1.3
“Go on, Rob. Tell me more about what you’ve found.”
Lucia was only half listening to Rob Singh as he burbled on about his research. The rest of her was concentrating on building herself a new body—and, perhaps, a new mind into the bargain.
“Well, it’s not as though I’ve actually found anything, per se,” he said. “It’s just an idea. All I did was ask for blueprints of the gifts from the Library. Now, normally, the Gifts are as stubborn as the UN Security Council when it comes to giving out secrets. Or rather as stubborn as the Security Council used to be, anyway.”
She detected a note of both sadness and incredulity in his tone, and she sympathized with him. It didn’t seem real to her at times that Earth had been destroyed, and not by the Starfish, either. Humans and their AI descendants had been the ones who had brought about the planet’s destruction, crushing it to dust and then sweeping it away as though it had never even existed. All that remained of humanity was a few creaky engrams struggling to survive in an exceedingly hostile universe.
“What was so different about this time?” she asked as the Surgery continued to follow her detailed instructions.
“This time I asked for blueprints of individual sections of the gifts, spindle by spindle,” he said excitedly. “And the Library quite happily gave them to me. You can call up schematics of the layout in here, for instance, or the Gallery. If you wanted to know the exact placement of every chair in the entire installation, the Gifts will provide it. It’s only when you ask for technical information about sensitive areas that they clam up.”
His telepresence robot rolled across the floor, flexed its limbs, and hopped up onto an examination table. Lucia was watching from a point low in the opposite wall. The robot, like a strange, skeletal dog, appeared to be looking straight at her.
“We could have done this ourselves, of course,” he went on. “But no one bothered, I guess, because we just assumed it wouldn’t tell us anything. But I did it anyway, out of curiosity. Sometimes you only find new things by looking at the obvious in a new light. It sounds trite, but it’s true.”
“And what did you find, Rob?”
“Hidden spaces,” he said. He paused for effect, and she thought she could sense the hint of a smile in his voice. “Great big chunks of nothing that we never suspected were there. I know we always knew there were things we didn’t know about the gifts, physically speaking, but we didn’t think any farther than that. I mean, consider the hole ships. They have ftl communicators, and they don’t need a structure like this to contain them. They have AIs, too, without having to devote an entire spindle to their operation.”
“There’s an awful lot of space for so little equipment, in other words.”
“Exactly!” The robot hopped down from the table and began to trundle around the room. “This spindle, for example, contains the Surgery—but what else? Sweet effay, that’s what. And those blank spots comprise no less than eighty percent of the spindle’s total volume. That’s a whole lot of nothing, Lucia. If you’re anything like me, then you can’t let go of the idea that there has to be something in all that space.”
“Such as?”
The robot effected a shrug. “I don’t know. The Gifts refuse to talk about those spaces, and I sure as hell can’t find a way into them. But just knowing they’re there tells us something, don’t you think?”
The Surgery chose that moment to advise her that the building of the new body was complete. Rob’s robot rolled to the middle of the room, directing its attention to the opposite wall, where a door was opening.
Lucia changed her pov to allow her to see it, too, although she didn’t raise her hopes too high. It was a long shot at best, albeit one worth trying. She wasn’t sure she’d understood half of what the design interface was telling her, or even begun to grasp the ramifications of the changes she’d suggested.
All reservations disappeared, however, when the door was fully open, revealing a small alcove and the newly designed I-suit floating in it.
“Fuck me, Lucia,” Rob muttered in amazement. His voice sounded breathless over the telepresence link. “You did it!”
The I-suit looked like nothing so much as a thick-skinned soap bubble, discernible only as a vague shimmer in the air. Faint rainbows danced across its surface as Rob’s robot rolled closer and raised camera stalks to view it more closely.
“Wait until the others find out!” he exclaimed. “None of us even considered creating another I-suit—”
“I’d prefer it if the others didn’t find out just yet Rob,” she cut in.
His camera stalks raised and twisted around the equivalent of a frown, she guessed. “Why not?”
“I’m not ready yet.” She regarded
the I-suit with apprehension, unable to shake the idea that maybe she’d got something wrong. But she knew she couldn’t hold back indefinitely. There was only one way to find out if it truly worked or not. “I’d like to test it out first.”
Exercising pathways through the gifts she’d become increasingly familiar with, she sent her pov through the walls of the Surgery and into the I-suit enclosure. She felt links reach out to touch the new structure, its arcane nature bending to approximate new forms, new pathways. She’d tried to program the process as precisely as possible, but without knowing the medium she was working with, it was hard to predict what the result would be. What were the I-suits made of, exactly? Were they matter, energy, or pure information? No one knew, and that ignorance was dangerous, especially when her very life might be on the line.
She pushed forward, tentatively. There was no resistance. Suppressing the misgivings stirring at the back of her mind, she abandoned all caution and plunged in, mentally keeping her fingers crossed.
There was a wild, disorienting moment when she seemed to exist in two locations simultaneously: in the strange, semantically real but purely hypothetical spaces of the gifts and at the same time in an entirely different place. Sensory information bloomed in her mind, bringing her a flood of sights, sounds, and sensations. She felt as though she was expanding, inflating like a balloon, and for a moment the notion of bursting terrified her.
“Lucia?” Rob’s voice seemed to reach her through new channels now, and she opened her eyes to see the robot staring up at her its posture one of almost comical surprise. “Is that you?”
She took a step forward, her new body moving with perfect ease. She felt warm, physical, complete. Her “skin” felt the movement of air around her; the soles of her feet registered her weight and adjusted automatically to keep her balance, and the index and middle fingers of her left hand were crossed, just as they had been mentally.
She brought them up in front of her face, staring at the shimmering, transparent reality with something approximating awe and amusement. She was actually inside the I-suit! At her instruction, it had molded itself to take her form without requiring an actual body to do it. She was a thing of energy, or exotic matter, or woven energy, or whatever the hell it was the I-suits were made of. She found herself not caring about the details. All that mattered was that her mind had a home!
“It’s incredible,” said Rob. “How do I get one?”
No doubt, she thought, that was what everyone would ask. But she didn’t like the thought of throngs of people queuing up for their new bodies, especially when at the moment at least, she was the only one who knew how to operate the I-suit creator. She had other things to do—escapes to plan.
“I still don’t want anyone knowing just yet, Rob,” she said. “Let’s just wait until we’ve finished exploring, okay?”
“Come on, Lucia! This is too damned important not to tell anyone!”
She felt a pang of guilt for wanting to protect her privacy, but she couldn’t help it. “At least let me build you one first, and show you how it’s done. That way you can show the others yourself.”
She could sense his hesitation in the awkward stiffness of the robot. “That wouldn’t be right,” he said eventually. “There are people who should go ahead of me. Thor and the others—they should have had new bodies like this before they left.”
“They already have I-suits. And the Hatzises who stayed behind and all the others who tell us what to do—most of them have I-suits, too. It’s people like you and me who don’t have them, Rob.” She noted the revolutionary edge creeping into her words and forced herself to tone it down. “Let’s hold onto this just a little while longer, okay? I don’t want to feel like a circus freak when word gets out.”
His hesitation was longer this time. She thought he might actually agree. A superfluous pilot forgotten upon the arrival of the Spinners, his only raison d’etre now was to explore the mysteries of the gifts, and it must have been frustrating for him to have to do so via the clumsy medium of a telepresence robot, enduring slight communication lags and other inconveniences. How much easier, he must have been thinking, to actually be there, touching things with his own hands.
Whatever his answer was to be, though, she never got to hear it.
An earsplitting siren suddenly filled the halls of Spindle Four. Lucia in her new body and Rob in the robot both looked up in surprise.
“That’s the Starfish alarm!” Rob’s voice was filled with disbelief. “But they’re not due here for another day!”
“Then they’ve obviously come early.” Mortified at the thought of alien destroyers about to rain destruction down upon them, she had to force herself to think clearly. This wasn’t the time for panic. If she was going to survive, she would have to be cool and resourceful.
But what could she do? What resources did she really have to defend herself against such an enemy? She hadn’t worked on how to make or steal a hole ship yet, so she had no means of escaping from the system.
She mentally shucked off the defeatist thought. She wasn’t about to give up. Her head might have been on the chopping block, but she would not concede defeat until the ax itself had fallen. There had to be a way out of this!
The gifts, she thought, wildly. I still have them! There must be something they can do.
“Come on!” She grabbed the robot by a bundle of limbs and tugged it along after her. Her I-body ran smoothly and naturally, without tiring.
The instantaneous transfer point linking Spindle Four to the Hub wasn’t far from the Surgery, but she didn’t know how much time she had. For all she knew, the Starfish might already be on top of the gifts, snapping their skyhooks to drop the wreckage down upon Rasmussen’s surface. The clock of her doom was ticking, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
There has to be a way....
Lucia repeated the mantra in her head over and over as she ran, half expecting with each footfall for the world to crumble into ruins around her. She reached the door leading to the Hub with Rob’s robot still in tow, firing concerned questions at her, all of which she ignored. She plunged through the door, and within a heartbeat found herself in the Hull. Only then did it occur to her that she might have been leaping straight into a ruined spindle, and therefore to her death. But there wasn’t time to dwell on the morbid. She needed to act fast.
To do what, though? she wondered. Looking around at the circle of doors, she realized she had no idea where to go next. There was nothing for her in the Library, the Science Hall, the Map Room, or the Lab, and the Surgery was about as useful as the Gallery. The Dry Dock was still empty—she ascertained this by reaching out with her I-body senses to touch the gifts, and realized instantly that no hole ship had arrived since last she’d checked—and the Hub itself was nothing more than a gateway. That left only one door.
“Lucia!” The telepresence robot struggled in her hands as the slight lag of the Marcus Chown’s transmitters caught up with its new location. “My God, Lucia! They’re—!”
With that, the robot went limp and silent. Far away, through her alien senses, she felt the Marcus Chown die, its engrams with it.
Fear struck her, then, deep and energizing. She’d never felt anything like it before. Adrenaline she knew she didn’t possess seemed to course through her new, electric body. Her thoughts flew at unprecedented rates. Whatever alien processor was now running her engram, it had considerably more power than anything UNESSPRO could have built. Time seemed to freeze as all the possibilities passed before her a second time, and death grew nearer by the nanosecond.
She faced the door that was her one remaining option. Black and peeling in places, it was a door she’d sent her mind through many times before, although she had never physically crossed its threshold.
She thought of shadows—the shadows that stirred in the deep places of the gifts, places even she had barely touched.
She asked herself where shadows might live, where one might go to join them.
She knew instantly what she had to do.
Abandoning the inert robot, she quickly made her way to the pitch-black door and reached out for the handle. It felt decidedly strange to see her hand moving out before her, barely visible apart from the faint gleaming of the waterlike surface.
A ghost before my time, she thought bleakly as her hand gripped the handle.
Would there be anything for her when she stepped through? She could sense the malignant alien forces gathering, building up like a thunderhead, preparing to sweep her presence from the universe. But she couldn’t hesitate. For better or worse, she opened the door and plunged into the Dark Room.
There was nothing to greet her but a dark emptiness. She bodily threw herself deeper into the room, risking directions she had hitherto feared to travel. The blackness was an abyss, and its depths held things beyond her comprehension. Always before she had stayed near the room’s the entrance, wary of going too deep and never being able to find her way out again. But now it no longer mattered. Now she welcomed the unimaginable depths of the impossibly black void.
I’m here, she called into the darkness. Dark shapes began to swirl around her, one moment like mist, the next like the coils of giant snakes. Deep in their heart she thought she detected eyes gleaming out at her.
The world around her shuddered violently as the Starfish destroyed one of the neighboring spindles. The shock wave rang along the superconducting cable connecting all the alien stations. The end had begun. Within moments, she knew, she would be staring into a void of a different kind altogether.
Can you hear me? she called into the dark. Can anyone hear me?
Silence.
Listen to me! It’s time to move on!
She felt despair, then, at the thought that her instincts had been wrong, that the strange illogic that had led her here had been as flawed—as human—as all the others who had attempted to pierce the veil of mystery surrounding the gifts.
Another shock wave rocked the spindle. She felt like weeping, but her new body didn’t have the capacity for that. She was shaken, rattled, gripped by pressures she couldn’t begin to fathom.
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